The professional
licence fees paid by Scoop's 140 accredited organisations
are the reason Scoop remains online. 90% of the costs of maintaining
Scoop are now being met sustainably. This is good news. But
with only 90% of our costs being met, we are not quite there
yet.

Like all news
media Scoop has been seriously impacted by the news crisis,
a crisis brought about by disruption to advertising markets. In September 2015 after nine
months of Operation Chrysalis, Scoop became a charitably
owned social enterprise as part of our effort to respond to
this crisis.

With generous support from member donations
Scoop has since undergone a complete business model transformation. We
needed to move away from our reliance on fickle
advertising revenue. Over a period of 2.5 years we have
moved from 70% advertising funding, to 0% advertising
funding.

So
far 216 Scoop members have pledged towards our campaign. But it is not the intended role of Foundation Members to support Scoop's core publishing activities with donations. Their support should only be needed to help cover our transition.

Scoop's core press release publishing operation is for the most part used by professional news users - people who access Scoop seeking information for business and work purposes. Our provision of comprehensive and timely information over the past 17 years has helped oil the wheels of commerce and Government. The value of this service is shown in our 500,000 readers - a sizeable portion of whom access the Scoop website while at work from business network domains.

Is Your Organisation
Using Scoop Legally?

In 2015 Scoop launched a way to make this work as a product, our "Ethical Paywall".

Two years on from the launch
we have convinced organisations of
most kinds – Govt. Departments, Universities, ITPs, law
firms, accountancy and consultancy firms, PR companies,
NGOs, councils and even NZ's Parliament – to sign on to what we believe is an equitable way to recover the
costs of providing the Scoop.co.nz service.

But most organisations are still using Scoop in breach of our clearly advertised terms of use. You can check if your organisation is accredited or not on our accredited organisation page here. The FAQ that follows will help answer any questions you have as to whether your organisations use is professional.

Today we have made it possible for organisations who would like to assist Scoop's campaign to pledge towards our "Opening The Election"
crowd-funding campaign in return for discounted six-month professional use licences - provided as a PledgeMe rewards. The special licenses come in four sizes, at never to be repeated introductory
prices:

Bottom line, it costs money
to maintain Scoop.co.nz, and at present those costs are not
being met. We have to recover those costs – or shut up
shop. We have deployed and marketed what we think is an
equitable and fair way to do this, and 140 New Zealand
organisations have already agreed to contribute. We hope you
and your organisation will swiftly join them.

The nature
of the news crisis is such that unless businesses and
professional organisations take responsibility for their
need to support the provision of quality information
services, they will find themselves in the
dark.

An FAQ

For
ease of use the remainder of this message is in FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions) format. I trust this will
assist in answering any specific questions you may have.

Scoop Professional
Use - FAQ ANSWERS

*********

Who is a
professional user of Scoop?

You or your
organisation are a professional users of Scoop if you either
rely on us regularly to access timely information and news,
or you rely on us to publish your press releases to our
broad and influential readership of 500,000 readers each
month.

*********

What is
Scoop's Ethical Paywall?

Scoop's terms and
conditions of use require professional users of Scoop to
purchase a Scoop End User [Organisation] Licence. The
licence fees depend on the size of the organisation and
start at $420 per year. We call it an "Ethical Paywall"
because business users who obtain direct benefit from our
service are paying for the costs of providing access to a
high quality news service to the general public.

As many
of these organisations are also submitting us their press
releases; and benefiting from our publication of them to our
readership, there is a win-win outcome for the public
interest from this arrangement.

The word Ethical is
derived from "Fair Trade" commerce where a disadvantaged
part of the supply chain is addressed. In this case there
are two disadvantaged parts to the news supply chain. News
consumers who would otherwise not have access to news and
news producers who would otherwise be unable to support
their operations. Scoop's "Ethical Paywall" is a world
first. You can read more about it in this presentation made to the Law Librarians
association.

*********

Who is
required to pay to use Scoop?

Scoop's ethical
paywall applies to organisations whose staff routinely use
Scoop.co.nz content as part of their professional working
roles.

If staff in your organisation:- read Scoop to
keep informed about what is going on in your area of
business;- read Scoop to keep informed about your
competitors activities;- search Google for material
related to work, and regularly access material from Scoop's
large database;- subscribes to a paid media-monitoring
service or subscriber newsletter which provides you with
links to Scoop material;- send us press releases for
publication and then link to them in social media and email
links to contacts.

Then you or your organisation requires
a professional use license.

*********

Who is not
required to pay to use Scoop?

You are not
required to have a licence to use Scoop if:- You are a
member of the public who accesses Scoop in your own time for
the purposes of being well informed;- Your organisation
is a purely voluntary organisation;- You are a
student;

*********

How many
professional Scoop users are there?

Scoop's
Google analytics[*] tell us Scoop is read by between 60,000
and 70,000 New Zealand readers each week, 300,000 each
month. 75% of Scoop's web traffic occurs during work hours
– from 8am to 6pm. It is probable that a portion of the
out-of-hours use of Scoop – including readers on mobile
phones 40% of total traffic – is also work related.

Last
week Scoop's New Zealand based readers accessed the website
from 1300 different network domains, including 987 ".nz" and
95 ".com". The vast bulk of these domains belong to places
of work with dedicated networks. Last week's domains
included, 44 academic institutions, 4 Crown Research
Institutes, 48 Govt agencies, 584 different .co.nz domains,
213 .net.nz domains and 33 .org.nz domains.

Last week
Scoop's New Zealand readers accessed 24,544 unique pages. As
roughly 4000 pages are published each month, this indicates
heavy use of Scoop's database of older material, being
accessed for research purposes,

[*] Google Analytics
can only identify details about traffic from domains that
are identified.

*********

How many
Scoop contributors are there?

Scoop has 23,000
different organisational names in its byline database.

Over the past two years we have compiled a list of the
people who regularly submit us professional content to
publish. As of today that list has 4889 names and email
addresses on it. As many of these people are from PR
agencies they can represent more than one organisation.

*********

Why don't
you just charge organisations for submitting press
releases?

It is true that there are many online
services that charge for either publishing or distributing
press releases. Scoop does not do so as it is the
comprehensiveness of our content stream that makes our
service useful and which attracts the large and influential
audience that encourages people to submit content to us. In
addition, if we were to charge for the publication of Press
Releases we would no longer be curating them on the basis of
their being newsworthy.

I.E. it is because Scoop does not
charge for publishing press releases that we are able to
both obtain and curate a set of press releases which is
useful to the public, and the publication and archival of
which is in the public interest.

Organisations can however
pay for have social media links, logos and additional
information about their organisation to be added to all
their releases. Scoop is presently considering providing a
basic level of this Infopages service to accredited
organisations.

Executive
Summary: After two years of transitioning from
advertising to a fully subscription and license based
business model we are 90% of the way to achieving
break-even. Our business development team believes we are
around 100 licence sales away from achieving
sustainability.

*********

What will
Scoop do with additional money it earns?

As Scoop
returns to sustainability, and eventually to profit, it will
reinvest funds in improving the service provided to users.
We would like to increase our editorial staff and publish
more original journalism.

We also have a backlog of
technical improvements to make the website more attractive,
accessible and useful for readers. At present 40% of Scoop's
readers are accessing the site via phone or tablet, and
improving the reading performance for these users is a
priority.

Thanks to public donor support this work has
started in recent months with the first fruit being the
launch of a new mobile friendly Scoop website - in Beta –
at m.scoop.co.nz. The new website makes use
of Google's accelerated mobile pages technology and is
blisteringly fast. In coming months we will migrate mobile
traffic directly to the new mobile website.

And once Scoop
is profitable it will return dividends to the Scoop
Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, which will in
turn provide grants to, and support activities that
encourage the practice of public interest
journalism.

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

Contact Alastair Thompson

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